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New Dimension. To hasten execution of these two basic plans, the Germans called into play a galactic pattern of action in the enemy's rear. When the clumsy Russians tried parachute troops in Finland, military men in other countries scoffed. In Norway, the Germans' parachutists looked better, but they were as nothing compared to the droves of hardy, highly trained, self-reliant German specialists who leapfrogged The Nether lands' border defenses in dozens of small independent groups.
Each man was armed and provisioned to fight independently. Each was instruc ted minutely in his mission and costumed for it. The grey green of their coveralls almost matched the Dutch uniform, and some reportedly came down in mufti, or Dressed as farm laborers, even as priests nd nuns. They carried automatic weapons, light machine guns, hand grenades and other explosives, fold-up bicycles, portable radio sets to flash back field reports. Unlike the Russians, whom sharpshooting Finns used to pick off at leisure as they floated down from safe jumping heights, these Germans had been trained to "pull off" from as low as 600 feet.
Their planes swooped behind hillocks or other cover to let them go, after shooting defenders out of the vicinity. By night they came weirdly down with parachute flares to guide them. They even used showers of dummies, complete with fake equipment, to decoy ground watchers to one landing spot while the real jumpers landed elsewhere. On some of the men captured were found instructions about Fifth-Column agents who would meet and guide them. One Nazi parachutist landed in the garden of the U. S. Legation, where no one could think what to do about it.
Dutch housewives nearly lynched such interlopers as they laid hands on.
Crises. Crucial in the first hours of this huge Blitzkrieg in Holland was the parachutists' battle for Rotterdam. After they seized Waalhaven Airport on the left bank and invaded the right bank to capture the Stock Exchange and railroad station, the Dutch rallied fiercely, drove them back across the river. R. A. F. planes bombed the airport Saturday morning, destroying 20 German craft parked there.
The Dutch retook the field and, at a cost of more than 1,000 men killed, drove out all the Germans on nearby Dordrecht Island, important for its shiploading facil ities and big bridges connecting Amster dam by road and rail with Belgium.
More Germans came soon and retook Waalhaven Airport. Fires broke out all over embattled Rotterdam. But the Ger man plan to grab Rotterdam overnight as Oslo was grabbed missed fire. One reason was that the Dutch fought furiously.
Another was that their forewarned and aggressive police had clapped into jail thousands of Nazi agents, Nazi sympa thizers and German nationals — the tradi tional servant class of Holland. There was some sniping by quislings, but their aid by which the Germans expected to take the coast cities in twelve hours and hamstring from the rear Dutch defense did not materialize on schedule.